Dharma Curious (he/him)

Same great Dharma, new SolarPunk packaging!

Check out DharmaCurious.neocities.org for ramblings on philosophy and the occasional creative writing project!

  • 9 Posts
  • 657 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

help-circle



  • Unicoi county went for Bernie in the 2016 primaries. It’s a very small town that has gone through a lot of shit trying to claw it’s way out of horrendously bad politics in the 80s and prior. Bumpass cove, where I’m sure some of worst damage was, was the site of nuclear waste dumping, and has been the nucleus of a major swing to the left for a lot of people in the area. Right down the road is Johnson City, a very progressive college town. Dumping on the victims of a disaster because their neighbors, or even they, have shitty politics is a shitty thing to do. Maybe those school kids deserve to get shot because their grandpappy is a Republican? Yes, moments like this should be catalysts for change, but victim blaming isn’t the route to take to that.



  • I feel like I’m about as computer savvy as most gen z. Born in 91, but we was poor, so it was the family dell (that I wasn’t allowed to do much with*) until 2008, got my first laptop in 2009**, it broke almost immediately because poor and cheap, and then got my first smart phone (T-Mobile G1) in 2010, and basically didn’t touch a laptop again until I started school 2020. I basically started over from scratch at that point, but now I run fedora full time and made myself learn some basic stuff, but I would consider myself pretty tech illiterate.

    *Because my brother was caught looking at porn, so computer time was severely cut back. Then I was caught sending sexy messages to someone. And then the final nail in the coffin was when I tried to dual boot it with some Linux distro, I don’t remember, borked it, and we had to wipe the hard drive

    **Technically I had a netbook before this, in like 07/08, that I used Wubi to install Ubuntu on, and I loved that. But never got more than browser level into it.




  • I’m not familiar with what’s going on with that. Care to enlighten me?

    And I totally get what you mean. More content would be great. I specifically miss my philosophical and spiritual communities from Reddit. I love learning about mythos and different religions, especially the more esoteric stuff, as well as political philosophy. That content just isn’t here in the same way (or sometimes, at all). It would be amazing to have that here. But I’d also rather go without certain things if it means not feeling like I’m being sold a story. Reddit felt like it wasn’t social media in the same way as Twitter and Facebook, but the moment I left it for Lemmy it was this scales-from-my-eyes kind of moment. It was crazy how toxic reddit was for me, and going back a few times, and looking at my old profile, I do not like the person I was there. Always on the defense, always on edge, always prepared to argue a point because I knew some asshole was going to attack me for no reason, and make me defend myself. It’s like it activates the caveman part of the brain and put me in fight or flight. I’d love for Lemmy to get big enough to have awesome content, but not so big as to devolve into that. But I’m not smart enough to know what that balance is, or if it’s even an issue of size, or just culture.



  • I’ll be honest, I hope Lemmy doesn’t reach a mainstream audience. It’s nice having a smaller site away from all the bullshit that will inevitably come with mainstream attention. We can say “just defederate! Join another instance” but when we get to a point where giant corpos are running instances that host 95% of users and 99% of content, we’ll be in the same boat as now if we defed, except that Lemmy will then have a mainstream (and thus mostly right of center) image. If this, or a little more, is all we’re ever really going to get on an open source platform that feels open source, I’m okay with that. I like seeing the same usernames around, and feeling like I found the internet equivalent of Stars Hollow, CT










  • That’s interesting. I hadn’t really considered that. It really only happens towards the end of the day, I just assumed it was a buildup of oils/skin cells/daily detritus that isn’t getting either blown away by air, because the lenses are blocking it, or dried out for the same reason. They’re Zenni frames and lenses